OAN Staff Blake Wolf
1:38 PM – Friday, August 30, 2024
2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump laid out his plan to dissolve the Justice Department’s current moratorium on the federal death penalty, should he win reelection.
Trump contextualized that the federal death penalty would be appropriate for: cop killers, pedophiles, and “major drug dealers,” as a day-one priority in his administration.
“Of course, I would. I would have executions on major drug dealers,” Trump told the DailyMail. “I would have, perhaps, the raping of a child, the killing of a police officer. I would have executions on the people that violently kill people.”
Trump’s first term executed the restoration of the federal death penalty in 2019. This resulted in 13 federal death row executions before President Joe Biden’s U.S. attorney general, Merrick Garland, announced a moratorium in 2021.
During a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border last week, Trump issued a stern warning to drug dealers linked to fentanyl overdose deaths, declaring that they should face capital punishment for their murderous crimes.
“The average drug dealer kills 500 people during that person’s lifetime. I would have no problem with that. If you’re going to stop the drug epidemic, you’re going to have to have a death penalty,” Trump said.
Currently, out of 50 states, 27 reserve the right to capital punishment, while seven have placed a suspension on executions.
During Harris’s 2004 inauguration speech as San Francisco’s district attorney, she vowed to “never charge the death penalty.” However, this is another issue that Harris flip-flopped on in 2010 while she was running to become California’s attorney general. She backtracked by later expressing that she would “enforce the death penalty as the law dictates.”
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